Money-and-Language Manipulation: New Methods of Modern Oligarchs

A Note from the Authors on 24 June 2021 (the Nativity of St. John the Baptist): In late August 2012, now almost 10 years ago, while we were reading and discussing together candidly a variety of challenging books, my wife and I both considered a few recurring and connected insights in these counterpointed texts which we then decided to write down, and then also to present some of this thoughtful matter to some others, especially for their corrections and discerning deeper judgments. These matters included the isolation of the human soul and the trials of protracted human isolation (Belloc); a refreshing Christian paradox about the temporal and supernatural realms (Jacques Maritain); the uprooting of the family, not only of the Christian and of the Catholic family; the only partly knowable conduct of some influential financial and political oligarchs and their often unaccountable covert networks; and the misuse of language (as in sophistry) its consequential helping along, and often covering up, the abuse of power. May the brief consideration we offer here still be a worthy contribution to some important discourse, and be even timely.

Dr. Robert Hickson and Dr. Maike Hickson

25 August 2012

King Saint Louis IX of France (d. 1270)

Money-and-Language Manipulation: New Methods of Modern Oligarchs

Epigraph: A Christian Paradox to Limit the Temptation to Pharisaical Presumption

“The order of good moral and civil administration prescribes that publicans and prostitutes shall take rank after persons of honorable life. The order of the Kingdom of Heaven permits publicans and prostitutes to take rank, in the inscrutable judgment of God, before persons of honorable life.” (Jacques Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World, London: Sheed & Ward, 1935), p. 78 – my emphasis added.)

The inhuman state we humans are living in at this point of history is getting clearer every day. It gets more and more obvious that the ruling elites are detached from the people they are ruling and that even these elites are ruled by other, mostly financial, elites. The citizens often feel powerless in the face of social, moral, financial and even natural disorder.

Part of the analysis today will have to look at the effects of the destruction of the family. Much courage, independent thought and cohesiveness have been taken from the citizens (often with their own collaboration) by the isolation of man from his other family members, especially by divorce (the lack of care for the vulnerable, the little ones and the old, often is the result of a lack of a housewife who is at home and thereby able to provide the care). There is just barely any more an existing harbor for us, where we have a refuge and a stronghold, a support and the love that would sustain us more fully in any political struggle. Yes, we are weakened by broken bonds, strife over children’s custody, division of property, rebukes and remorse. We have sunk down into the moral and social anarchy which has grave effects for the Bonum Commune. Such a hedonistic (“I only do what gives me pleasure”) and atomized society is too much self-absorbed to be able to look at the large picture in society and to act upon its analyses.

The moral foundation of society has been wrecked, by an endless attack on the Christian faith and culture which was the foundation for a flourishing civilization. Analysts have shown the destructive effects of the theories of several cultural and political institutions and foundations (like the Tavistock Institute and the Frankfurt School) upon society and family. The Christian Creed and Morals gave the people the help and the disciplined structure to live better in this world, even though this world will always also be a valley of tears. We cannot escape the suffering. And love hurts.

Europe has seen many wars and revolutions in the last two and a half centuries. They have largely contributed to the self-destruction of a society where a child cannot (and may not) any more play unharmed in the public playgrounds and where elderly are not any more respected, protected and actively helped by the young. What kind of people are we that we do not protect any more the vulnerable ones, one of the major aims of Christianity? The Lord was not jesting in the Gospel of Matthew 25:31-46. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me.”

How have we come to this state of gradual rejection or quiet apostasy?

Much research has been done on the history of revolution and war as a means to fragment, destabilize, disrupt and atomize, formerly coherent and rooted societies, especially Christian. (These techniques are now, as it seems, applied more and more to the still somewhat consistent and resistant Muslim countries). War and revolution destroy the existing political stabilities and governments and uproot and destroy families by death and upheaval. Who was behind the destruction of the once coherent Christian countries in Europe?

It is known now that all the major leaders of the Enlightenment movement which replaced a Faith in God by a Faith in “Reason” of sorts were Freemasons. Freemasons aimed at the destruction of the Monarchy (as a stabilizing factor and somewhat a bulwark against money-manipulation, especially if the King was truly Christian) and of the Catholic Church as the moral guide. Both were attacked and undermined by the French Revolution, and in the sequence, by the growing nationalist movements in the 19^th century which aimed at the replacement of the previous order and morals by an overstrengthening of the nationalistic feelings of the people and by centralizing the political power. Monarchies were much more subsidarian than ever were modern states.

At a closer look, it becomes clear that the oligarchies who run today the money and language manipulation (as a tool for governance) were already then involved in the financing of the revolutions since 1789, most prominently in the Russian Revolution, but also even of the disruptive and inhuman national-socialist revolution in Germany. Names like the Warburgs, the Mellons, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers are to be mentioned here, among others.

Many leading figures of all the revolutions and of new philosophies in the modern era have been very interested in the occult world, and often in the higher Gnostic Freemasonry, specifically. Karl Marx wrote poems in honor of Satan; Freud secretly believed in the occult; Hegel himself was deeply rooted in the Kabbalah; many of the leaders of the Enlightenment were Rosicrucians. Charles Darwin, whose theory of the survival of the fittest is in accord with dialectical thinking (i.e., there is always a purported thesis and an antithesis, out of whose environmental conflict results a “better” or “more fit” synthesis), stems from a family deeply rooted in Freemasonry. Friedrich Nietzsche was initiated into the Eleusinian Cults and his book “Beyond Good and Evil” represents the essence of Gnostic thinking, i.e., that in the dialectical way we humans have to move beyond the old Christian antagonism of good and evil and have to embrace both in a higher synthesis. Historical research only later will show how many of those intellectuals who convinced the masses that there is no God and that atheism is a form of liberty, were themselves truly believing in the existence of the world beyond, with the difference that they followed the evil one, often using an euphemism, such as Lucifer. It would explain the evil effects of their philosophies and theories. What if one day it would come to light that the so-called enlightened people of today had fallen into the trap of mere propaganda, deception and self-deception? One only needs to look at the fruits of those “freeing” theories. The financial oligarchies, intertwined with the intellectual elites, have both promoted and empowered the state we are in today. They have apparently needed uprooted people for their plans of manipulative governance and profit-making.

The history of the last two centuries and more cannot be written without the immense role of these financial oligarchies. Their aim: the destruction of the Christian culture and civilization with its human face and compassion for the poor and the vulnerable and the strengthening of ideologies and movements which lead to a fragmentation and destabilization of the societies, which are constituted by humans who are mostly living in families. That is where these oligarchies needed specious (but false) theories and propaganda to instill ideas into the minds of men that would lead them away from a healthy and more fully virtuous way of life: Feminism, Communism, Socialism, Darwinism, Capitalism, Gender-Mainstreaming, to name but a few, are all leading people to help to form a less humane society. They all lead to the disruption of family life, the nucleus of human freedom and love.

It is very worthwhile in this context to go back a hundred years and to look at the work and writings of a few courageous men with a big heart, men of mercy and magnanimity, who in England fought the beginning of this modern (early 20^th century) work of destruction, with love, keen intellect and the Catholic Faith as their differentiated tools: Hilaire Belloc, G.K Chesterton and Father Vincent McNabb. All three men discerningly saw the sprouting of these above-mentioned theories, many of which first sprang up in England at the time, and they perseveringly and joyfully resisted them. They had a longer historical view and the right criteria and standards to see the inherent actual consequences, as well as the fuller final logical implications, of such false theories.

Chesterton in his book What’s Wrong with the World (1910), for example, presented in a lovely and warm way the beauty of the home, especially made by a wife and mother who loves her whole family and makes a home with love and care. Elsewhere, he also showed the cruelty of divorce and its evil effects, especially upon the children.

Hilaire Belloc resisted the growing power of the state (something that seldom existed ever before in a Monarchical state) in his book The Servile State (1912). He also strongly resisted the spirit of mammon which was spreading in his time and defended the local and rooted life on the countryside.

Father McNabb, in his The Church and the Land book (1926),^¹ resisted the moving of the people into to the cities and argued that they should return more rootedly to the land, where a family can live independently and make a living by skilled crafts and by farming on its own land, and with responsibility and accountability.

They all three saw the importance of private property and personal responsibility and saw the frigidly indifferent and manipulative ill-rule of these financial oligarchies.

They fought with magnanimity and they always gave persevering encouragement.

They all three are connected with the mediating concept of Distributism, which is a real answer to the old dialectic between Capitalism and Socialism, inasmuch as it proposes to assure that the great majority of citizens owns their own land and are thereby made capable to live a dignified and ideologically independent life.

These three authors are worthy to be studied in the context of our time and the troubles we are facing. They, too, resisted, already then, aggressive military intrusions and intervention, as in the case of the British Empire’s two, and slyly expanding, Boer Wars (1880-1881; 1899-1902), especially the second one. They also criticized biological and social Darwinism, Euthanasia and any other form of inhumanity. But, they also acted in their own personal lives according to their beliefs. There is a very touching story about Father McNabb himself in old age, who, secretly dressed up in old woman’s clothes, sneaked regularly into a little apartment of a very elderly and sick woman and cleaned her apartment. This only came gradually to light when he died in 1943 and the woman was suddenly left without any help in her state of vulnerability and illness.

Criminal Capitalism for the Elites, Collective Socialism for the Masses?

Since the time of these authors we have now discussed, much has been further developed. The old dichotomy between Capitalism and Socialism has been brought into a new synthesis, into globalist Capitalism with a Socialist side: the merging of the two opposites, still following the old Hegelian dialectic. With each step, more and more cultural, religious and human substance gets destroyed and subtly undermined. Here is how these two former opposites work now together, enhanced by the new methods and technologies of the 21^th century, with its multi-media and consumerist apparatus and with it further-developed psycho-drugs and psycho-techniques.

Capitalism is used as a tool to further uproot local businesses and farms, to further destroy family life through inhuman work schedules and fear of loss of jobs, a new form of slavery.

Socialism is used in the welfare-warfare state to make people mentally vaguer, sluggish and inordinately dependent. It also is used as a tool to turn the limited state into an intrusive therapeutic state which has a say in every matter, even in the most intimate questions of the education of children, and of how women should run their household, and so on.

While the early revolutions in modern times manifested much violence, the new methods of domination and of manipulative control today have been sophisticated and are in general less violent. While Communism had still its Gulag System, and Nazism its concentration camps, the modern man today is in the trap of consumerism, body idolatry, sexual degeneration and technological bondage and especially “electronic slavery.” Many people are so softened and occupied that they have neither the capability nor the will any more to think, so as to draw essential conclusions and to act upon them.

One of the conclusions of this little essay is that one has to live out oneself, and more fully, the precepts and counsels and generous invitations of Christianity in order to be able to be convincing and appealing to other people. Real charity in its generous selflessness still touches the human heart. When truth is spoken, it still appeals to the human mind.

–CODA–

One of the great advantages in our time of the United States, with all its all-too-well-known problems, is the greater spiritual and spatial freedom that still exist. One good example is the Homeschool Movement. The numbers of families who withdraw their children from the state schools and their propaganda and moral sewage are growing very considerably. They just school them at home with the help of the many homeschool organizations which provide them with learning material and indispensable guidance, or they organize themselves into subsidiary co-operatives. These families make use of their still-legal liberties in this country to nourish the minds of their little ones with truth and a fitting sense of proportion and purpose, not with intellectual and moral corruption.

A timely and timeless warning from the wisdom of Hilaire Belloc, from his chapter concerning the truly tragic life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and rival of Elizabeth Tudor, the Queen of England who, at the persistent prompting of her main counsellor William Cecil, then finally herself reluctantly consented to Mary Stuart’s unjust execution, after having kept her imprisoned in England and sequestered for many years (almost nineteen). From his heart, Hilaire Belloc therefore says: “Isolation is the chief evil of human life and isolation was imposed upon this woman [Mary Stuart] always and everywhere. When she made one desperate effort to be rid of it [i.e., of that protracted, terrible isolation] that effort was itself fatal to her.” (Hilaire Belloc, Elizabethan Commentary (London: Cassell and Company LTD, 1942), page 158—my emphasis added.)

—FINIS—

1This book is a collection of essays addressing the problems of the Industrial Revolution with Christian philosophy and social thought. Among the topics included are industrialism and the rise of unemployment; the evil of the wage system; the importance of land ownership and the restoration of craft production; the necessary connection between real work and spiritual salvation. It is intended for anyone studying social and economic thought as well as Catholic and Christian studies.

“That Unended War…Against the Innocent”: Evelyn Waugh and Father McNabb, O.P.

Dr. Robert Hickson 9 January 2019 (Within the Octave of Epiphany)

Saint Julian of Antioch (d. 313 AD)

Epigraph

***

“The present writer’s years of life can now be so few, at most, that the only reason for stating an opinion is that he thinks it true, and its opposite opinion not only untrue but harmful.” (Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., “The Family,” Chapter 5 of the 1934 anthology Flee to the Fields—Father McNabb, speaking himself, was to die eleven years later, during World War II, in 1943.)

***

“As if in gratitude to the Family for having given Him welcome, He raised to the dignity of the supernatural the plighted love that unites husband and wife—father and mother.” (Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., “The Family,” Chapter 5 of Flee to the Fields (1934))

***

“And He went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject to them.” (Luke 2:51)

***

Recently re-reading after some twenty years one of Father Vincent McNabb’s own writings on the family, and thus on Nazareth, I saw for the first time the importance and timeliness of one of the principles that he so concisely and lucidly articulates.

Writing in the early 1930s about one of “The Dangers to the Family”–in one sub-section of his longer essay, entitled “The Family”—he acutely said:

The second danger arises from the sentimental as distinct from the rational and ethical view of divorce. We have reached a legal state [already in 1934] when the fate of children can be decided by the existent sentiment between their father and their mother. Our divorce laws [in England], although not considered wide enough, are sufficiently wide to be governed by the principle that “it is immoral for a man and woman to remain together when they have ceased to love each other.” This principle largely initiated here in the West has been carried out with characteristic consistency in Soviet Russia [under Lenin, N. Krupskaya, A. Kollontai, and Stalin].¹

Soon after reflecting on this principle and its increasingly promiscuous implementation, which is all too often to the grave detriment and long-term harm of the innocent children, I thought of Evelyn Waugh’s 1950 historical novel, Helena, especially one passage from Chapter 11, entitled “Epiphany.”² The conjunction and counterpoint of these two Catholic authors, with their fresh insights, will teach us still many important truths.

Shortly before Waugh’s Helen is to find the Cross in Jerusalem, she visits Bethlehem on the Feast of the Epiphany and, with deep wonder, identifies with the Three Royal Wise Men, as they were personified and presented by three Greek monks in their re-enactment of the composite scene:

Helena [herself a recent convert] knew little Greek and her thoughts were not in the words or anywhere in the immediate scene. She forgot even her quest [for the True Cross] and was dead to everything except the swaddled child long ago and those three royal sages who had come from so far to adore him.

“This is my day,” she thought, “and these [three royal sages] are my kind.”….

“Like me,” she said to them, “you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way.”….

“How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot.”….

“You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod [i.e., “Crudelis Herodes”]. Deadly exchange of compliments [false flattery and deception] in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!” (222-223—my emphasis added)

We think at once about the impending Slaughter of the Holy Innocents and the three-decade later call for the release of criminal Barabbas and the resultant raging betrayal of innocent Jesus. Today, too, the Little Ones—the Parvuli of Christ—are indifferently, even impenitently, slaughtered. We are numbed by the magnitude of the dead and we struggle yet with the Permissive Will of God.

The wholehearted Evelyn Waugh nonetheless chooses to show us more of Empress Helena’s heart (and Waugh’s own heart, too) as he presents further and imaginative expressions to “those three royal sages” (222):

“Yet you came [to the Nativity], and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too. You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family….

“You are my especial patrons,” said Helena, “and patrons of all late-comers [to Christ], of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.

“Dear cousins [ye royal sages], pray for me,” said Helena, “and for my poor overloaded son [the still unbaptized Emperor Constantine]. May he, too, before the end, find kneeling-space in the straw….

“For His sake who did not reject your [three] curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.” (223-224—my emphasis added)

In this passage, Evelyn Waugh shows us a reverent mother’s prayer for her son, hoping that he, too, would soon come to kneel humbly in adoration before the Christ Child—considering also His later, maturing youth in Nazareth. Helena herself, despite her energetic quest and mission, manifests a gracious reverence and spiritual childhood. She again and again acknowledges and submits to Divine Authority, believing that her own son must yet, and soon, be baptized—not just on his deathbed. For, she sees that he is pitifully “overloaded” by his own “Power without Grace.”

In 1934, Father McNabb likewise saw the pitiful spread of temporal “power without grace”–that is, without divine grace. After first commenting on “the fate of children” (76) and thus on the ill fruits of an increasingly-resorted-to secular principle of disorder—namely, “it is immoral for a man and woman to remain together [in marriage and thus in the full rearing of their children] when they have [purportedly] ceased to love each other” (76—my emphasis added)—he speaks of another peril to the family:

The third danger to family life springs from the modern rejection of obedience to authority [to include the authority of the father]. This rejection begins by disobedience to the authority of God [thus also to the Rights of God abiding]. But, as all lawful authority is, as such, of divine right, the rejection of divine authority tends to dissolve the claims and rights of all authority. In this welter of might without right such fundamental rights as that of the parent and the family [as a unit] tend to be set aside as belated [outmoded] or suppressed as harmful. (76—my emphasis added)

Such interrelated matters are part of “the threatened social avalanche” (76) that was seemingly accumulating, and thus “of deep concern” (76) to Father McNabb five years before the outbreak of World War II.

Five years after the end of World War II, Evelyn Waugh had another insight about that then-actual “social avalanche.” For, like Father McNabb (1868-1943), Waugh knew that Christ was being hunted even at His birth and also soon thereafter. Other Holy Innocents were likewise altogether threatened. For, in a prior and deceitful “deadly exchange” with the graceless and cruel power of Herod (“Crudelis Herodes”) “there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!” (223—my emphasis added)

Almost seventy years after those heartfelt words from Evelyn Waugh, that war is still “unended.” The attacks on innocence and purity have now even increased. The amount and intensity of crude and cruel “power without grace” have also seemed to have increased. Yet, for the Loyal Faithful, wherever evil abounds, indispensable Divine Grace superabounds and we are to co-operate.

In one of his 416 A.D. sermons against the Pelagians (Sermo 169, 13—PL 38, 923), Saint Augustine of Hippo effectively said that God created us without our co-operation, but He will not save us without our co-operation. That is to say, without our free consent.

–Finis–

1Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., Chapter 5 of Flee to the Fields (Norfolk, Virginia: IHS Press, 2003), p. 76—my emphasis added. This is a new addition of the original 1934 book, Flee to the Fields: The Founding Papers of the Catholic Land Movement, which also preserves Hilaire Belloc’s original 4-page Preface, which is now on pages 15-18. All further references to this book will be placed above in parentheses.

2Evelyn Waugh, Helena (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950). All further references to this book will be placed above in parentheses.